El 20%

With a small margin of error, I can safely say that twenty percent of the time that I arrive at I.E.S. La Laboral, at least one of my classes is canceled. I can also say that about two percent of the time that one of these classes is canceled, someone calls me to tell me. This results in something like an eighteen percent chance that I will come to school with a minimum of one class being canceled. I also hold the bantom weight class belt for ¨Most Wacky Schedule Ever¨, and will often have days where I only have one class. With that being said, I find myself coming to school every once in a while only to find that I should have taken my chances and remained in my bed.

Today is the last day of classes before the Christmas break, and it happened to be one of these no-call-no-class days. While I might have been a bit tiffy any other day about this unfortunate news, today my bad mood was set to balance quickly as a random Spanish teacher, or admistrator, with glasses and thin grey hair pulled back into a gnarly pony tail popped out of a door I had never noticed and demanded that I enter. Waiting inside for me was a selection of boxes of wine. When I say boxes of wine I do not mean Franzia, or Gato Negro contained in a plastic bladder inside of a cardboard box, but rather an ornately decorated cardboard box with three bottles of assorted wine made by the students and professors here at the school. To me, this is class. I now hoist a box around school containing a white Tempranillo, red Joven Maceración Carbónica (whatever the hell that means), and one other that I can not see as it is in between the other two and covered by cardboard. In thirty minutes I will sit with my box of wine and have lunch with all of the professors in the school.

These same professors surprised me yesterday with a Christmas gift from Zara, the fashionable Spanish clothing store known worldwide. The fleece-lined knit hoodie is perfect for the frigid weather and definitely has quite a bit of style. It has a double lined hood so as to keep from getting as wet when it rains, and is actually really heavy. It is the perfect gift for the weather, and I was really quite moved by their generous action. I assume that they wanted to get me something warm since they are always saying that I am not wearing enought clothes and that Spain is going to wreck my world if I don´t get real.

Last night I saw the movie Avatar in 3-d with Marta and was surprised at how beautiful this movie was. It was like some kind of lucid acid trip that was being dubbed in Spanish, which possibly made it that much more of a mind bender. While I am really put off by everything being dubbed here, and the Spanish people´s stubborn refusal to attempt other languages, this movie was beautiful and visually captivating enough to push aside my hate for dubbed voices. The sad thing was that I understood the alien people in the movie better, because they did not speak ¨Spanish¨very well as it was their second tongue. This made me feel a little bit dumb, but complacent as alien voices dubbed alien voices for aliens on foreign planet in a foreign movie theatre. ¿What? This movie theatre/shopping complex was a massive behemoth of plutocracy just a few miles outside of the city. Being quite late in the evening and very empty, the capitalistic compound was immensely surreal as there were Christmas decorations, lights, and music playing, but hardly a soul to be seen in this airplane hangar of a bulding. Marta let me drive us home and was terrified and telling me where to turn at every road. Typical, but deserving as I am sure that I seem untrustworthy with the car of someone´s parents.
It´s about to be a celebration bitches.